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  • Roel Nieskenspixelambacht@typo.social
    Oct 8, 2026, 7:11 AM

    RE: oldbytes.space/@stevewetherill

    I have *so* mixed feelings about this. On one hand, I have had SO MANY HOURS of frustration the get cycles correct, debugging timing and raster bugs, staring at (in my case, 6502) machine language trying to grok why my code was off. If you told my 15-year-old me that in the future you can just *wish* for your code to work, and the robot genie will Make It So, taking intro account the peculiarities of the CPU, the machine language, all the hardware specifics of your computer, I would've let out the most heartfelt HALLELUJA you'd ever heard.

    But on the other hand, the last bastion of human cleverness in coding is now also taken over by LLM-assisted coding.

    I want my demoscene productions to evoke "how did they DO THAT?!", not "did they let AI do that?"

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  • Roel Nieskenspixelambacht@typo.social
    Oct 8, 2026, 7:16 AM

    I just want to be 107% clear: I don't quote-boost this as an attack or snear at @stevewetherill. It's also not an anti/pro AI post. I mean this as a "what a time to be alive" post, with whatever mixed emotions that you can attach to that.

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  • Steve Wetherillstevewetherill@oldbytes.space
    Oct 8, 2026, 7:39 AM

    @pixelambacht right, this is my own very clever (ahem) code from 40 years ago. In this specific case I am planning on releasing the source to this and a number of other games. The original source is long since lost, so I reverse engineered them, using Claude. Claude did a great job, but there are known and unknown bugs extant in the originals. And, the proof of a good disassembly is being able to add/remove code and data as needed to allow such bug fixes to occur (no hard coded addresses, no alignment issues, etc). So bug fixing is one thing, this game is a multi-load and I was curious to know if, in 2026, I could simplify and make everything a single load. Turns out, I can. And when I say “I”, I mean Codex with my input of course. On the specifics here, the original game had extreme loop unrolling. Rerolling some of that saved the bulk of the memory required, and between my suggestion of using the stack for conditional loop control, and Codex’s observation that I already pull the Sprite data from the stack, we managed to avoid the performance loss that might otherwise have occurred when rerolling unrolled loops.

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  • Roel Nieskenspixelambacht@typo.social
    Oct 8, 2026, 11:19 AM

    @stevewetherill The luxury of today's tools, right! I can't believe most of these games and demos were coded on the same machine the code needed to run on.

    I realize now I was reading your stories on Substack. I hope you write up how this disassembly/revamp went when you finish it! I was never able to finish a game so my sources aren't worth revisiting (though I still have 'em!) but I hope to get that satisfaction vicariously through your posts! :-)

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